The Ancient Dinosaur Graveyards Of Australia's Outback | Dinosaurs In The Outback | Timeline

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] Imagine This you're mustering sheep and you see sticking out of the ground a bone a thigh bone a femur this is a thigh bone of a sheep and it's not what you found this is a thigh bone of a cow imagine a femur bigger than me it'll belong to an animal at least 20 meters from nose to tail it'll belong to a sauropod like this one and you wouldn't expect here but this is where the bone was found luckily for me sauropods don't live here anymore but once upon a time there were herds of them out here once upon a time there were monsters in the outback [Music] foreign this is a program about dinosaurs about monsters in the outback what they were how they lived and how it is that 65 million years after they vanished we can piece together their story dinosaurs have been found almost everywhere actually almost everywhere but Australia where until recently very little evidence and none of the real giants had been found and then something happened which revolutionized our understanding of Australia's dinosaurs it happened in Queensland near a place called winter has the look of a place that's never changed you can't help thinking that it must have looked like this forever in fact it's changed a lot these grasslands were once watered by Meandering rivers and filled with towering plant life and the rulers of this landscape were giants it was a time when monsters like the plant-eating sauropods Ruled the Earth they were in charge they were enormous but some of their cousins were not some with the size of a chicken some with the size of the family dog or a cow they came in all shapes and sizes and then they vanished all of them about 65 million years ago most scientists believe a giant meteor slammed into the Gulf of Mexico sending up clouds of dirt and dust blocking the sun causing temperatures to fall and creating an awful cold that wiped out much of life on Earth the story of human beings started long after that event long after the age of the Giants the death of the last dinosaurs and the emergence of our ancestors are events separated by tens of millions of years the first evidence of these creatures confused people dragons they said Giants but gradually the truth dawned that the evidence was pointing to a whole new class of extinct creatures scientists gave them a name which means terrible lizard and since those first discoveries barely 200 years ago their evidence has been found just about everywhere and out that Queensland seems to have been a particularly popular home or hunting ground to a number of different species of the terrible lizards the Greek word for which is dinosauros if you love history then you'll love history hit our extensive library of documentary features everything from the ancient origins of our earliest ancestors to the daring mission to sink the bismar history hit has hundreds of exclusive documentaries with unrivaled access to the world's best historians we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and timeline fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code timeline at checkout the dinosaurs that roamed the Outback were different from those that have been found in other parts of the world we can never see them in real life but we can imagine what they look like this is an ornithopod he's a local and we can tell by his footprint that he was pretty quick discovering him and all the other creatures that once called this place home has happened because of a chance find made by David Elliott have been sheep and cattle farmers in the Winton district for several Generations this is David's property Belmont he was mustering sheep on the place when he found the monster thigh bone that started our story David is taking me to the site of that historic discovery David Elliot's find which triggered unprecedented excitement was identified as the thigh bone from a sauropod now fittingly nicknamed Elliot so this is the site where you first found Elliot yeah yeah this is where we found Ellie so I've seen the size of the femur I mean was it sticking up out of the ground did you almost trip over no no it was funny really because what I was happening I was mushing him over sheep and I was trying to bring them to the ball which is about a kilometer or so the other side of us here and of course when you've got cheap that don't want to go where they're where you're trying to make them go and I was just going backwards and forwards here probably pretty cranky and I had to Swerve the bike to miss a bunch of rocks as I went past I thought that's not yeah every truck sorry and she's going that way I had tube going that way and I still turned around again yeah it was actually the sheep that led you to them yeah that's it yeah and we knew that if we brought it up and brought it home we'd never get any work done for a week and we were really busy so we purposely left it here and I was here for a year so you just left the bone yeah yeah they say that okay yeah yeah you do but we did finally pick it up so we collected everything we took back to the house and we had it on a big old ping pong table in the house but if you're fitting them together this bunny got bigger bigger So eventually we had a bite about this wide across the base and and this shape and you can see it was the end of a leg bone David and his wife Judy knew they had something special so David invited the Queensland Museum to come and have a look at this stage I had nothing to do with paleontology I ran the property and that's what I did so I just brought them in thinking it's definitely dinosaur bone yeah yeah but they walked in and I just remember one of the girls sitting back and saying wow you know so the Queensland Museum organized a small group of their own people so there's about six or seven of them who came out live now shooting quarters for a week they were determined that they would see if there was more a team of paleontologists from the Queensland Museum put in a huge effort with shovels and crowbars but after a week of digging they still hadn't found anything They concluded the chance discovery of a partial thigh bone they had dubbed Elliot was an isolated fragment rather than part of a still hidden skeleton David Elliott was not convinced he's a farmer and he knows the unique characteristics of the soil in these parts so what made you think that you needed to get them to dig deeper when you look at this black soil country like this looks all the same but it's not just a layer that goes all the way down for 10 20 30 meters deep it's only one meter deep and what it is is the weathering layout so that's there you probably need to go and look where it might have come from rather than look where it is at the moment and and I sort of had a pretty fair idea that that's probably what we should be doing that's why I sort of look you know we need to get blow get all this black soil off and then have a look underneath which is what we suggested to them so you've decided that you're going to dig further we brought the tractor out that afternoon and you know we just kept digging away and digging away and I got down about a meeting we were very lucky because we dug pretty well exactly over top of where the bone was we could have been 10 meters away and not even Canada but we were very lucky we were right on top of it I was just digging and dumping you know you can't get another load and done but and Judy was just there with a shovel going through the Mounds to see you know if there was anything next when she starts waving her hands you know and I said what's what's gone she said so I jumped off the track and I went across and had a look it was the end of the femur it was the opposite end of the FEMA that I had found the face had already come to the top probably thousands of years ago all broken down the little pieces the head was instill in one big piece down about a meter and then underneath that was the shaft [Music] well we'll wait till Queen's a museum like stand up they're going to turn up sometime rather and and he looks at it and he said what's that I said what do you think it is and he grabs and tips it over and oh that was slapping us on the back [Music] Dr Scott Hucknall is a vertebrate paleontologist and Senior curator at the Queensland Museum's geosciences Department he was one of the first academics to respond to David's Discovery and has been involved with winton's dinosaurs ever since so this is where it all began this is Elliot yeah this is the Elliot FEMA well when we went into his dining room and David shows us this big chunk of bone even that fragment at the time was just a blow away at mouths of wide open just looking at this thing going wow that's a huge dinosaur even just from a fragment but you wouldn't have found it without the bulldozer that's right it's kind of ironic this amazing Natural History Revolution where we're finding more dinosaurs than we ever have in the past revolves around one thing using a big loader so paleontologists before Elliot they weren't using big equipment well most of the discoveries would have been found just like the first bit of Elliot on the surface and paleontologists going out there would have simply picked the stuff up off the surface collected it brought it back to the museum and that was it their their concept of fossils out there was basically that the layer which had the bone in it had disappeared and and what was left is all you had but in fact it's the opposite way around the stuff that was on the surface was just the tip of the iceberg everything else was underneath the ground have we found anything like kit before not something this big so we've made the big announcement that this was Australia's largest dinosaur but the fact is that that just LED on to all these new discoveries with huge dinosaurs and the exciting thing from that point of view is that what we have here is just the tip of the iceberg just the start of one of the most amazing periods in Australian natural history David Elliott's Discovery triggered Australia's Dinosaur Revolution it was now time to discover what other secrets were buried in the winter region nothing we can see in Winton today gives any clue to the prehistoric landscape isolated from other land masses Australia would become home to Unique flora and fauna a country around Winton was once forested Wetland adorned with Lush vegetation it can be hard to imagine unless you have the knowledge of a local farmer or of a scientist Dr Alex Cook a paleontologist and once the senior curator of geosciences at the Queensland Museum was one of the first paleontologists to become involved in digging for bones in this part of the world foreign ologists that actually went out to the Discovery site how was that it was awe-inspiring the first time we laid eyes on the first bone of Elliot we knew we had a very very large dinosaur much larger than anything that had been ever found before on the Australian continent and when we went to the site we realized that there were bones strewn over 400 meters so that we knew we're going to have the biggest dinosaur dick ever to have happened in Australia so it was a very exciting time [Music] in paleontology then I mean how much work had been done before that been little bits and pieces done on on the fossil dinosaurs of Queensland not a huge amount but the fines that had been made had been made by chance this one also made by chance was the first time with systematically dug a huge excavation for a dinosaur [Music] I've been seeing some pretty spectacular landscape around here but what am I actually looking at the landscapes in this area are made up of rocks of the Winton formation and the wind in formation is a group of rocks which makes up the youngest part of the Great Artesian Basin they were deposited here between 98 and 95 million years ago on environments such as River Plains in lakes in creeks and streams these were environments where dinosaurs thrived and we get those animals preserved in the rocks of the Winton formation what is it about the geology which gives it that exceptional preservation characteristics a couple of things happened after the deposition of the Winton formation it was buried fairly quickly so we have lots of sediment pouring into the great Artesian Basin and that helped preserve the fossils and the dinosaur bones in particular and so what have all of all lines meant for Australian paleontology in the last 10 years there have been so many new discoveries of dinosaurs around the Winton District that this has added a great deal to the international interest in what's here in Australia and the fact that we do actually have dinosaurs despite looking for 100 years and that there are different types and there's a unique Fauna of dinosaurs and do we still have more work to go at the moment there's about 60 dinosaur sites on the books that haven't been dug up so there's enough work there probably for the next 90 or so years it'll keep you busy keep me busy for scientists such as geologists and paleontologists investigating the history of our planet can be a bit like rummaging through garbage you have to reach in find what's under the surface and look at what's been buried and forgotten with a passage of time foreign plants and animals may change over the generations but rocks and anything trapped in them stay the same rocks might erode crack or get buried but they don't evolve which is why rummaging can tell us about a fabulously remote past [Music] remains have been found hereabouts of many species of life from huge petrified trees and dinosaur bones to tiny insects and pollen grains some are common but others haven't been found anywhere else [Music] so what do we mean when we say the remains what can be left of something that died 60 or 70 or 100 million years ago the answer surprisingly is quite a lot thanks to a process known as fossilization we owe almost all we know about the prehistoric world to fossils fossils need very particular circumstances if they are to be formed and if they are to survive Winton gets it just right [Music] so why Winton why all the dinosaurs out here to find a dinosaur you've got to be looking at a area where a dinosaur was living at the time it died so the Winton deposits for instance are around 95 million years old that's within the age of dinosaurs the dinosaurs live around 245 250 million years ago right through to 65 million years ago that's when they were here but the Earth's about four and a half billion years old so they weren't around the whole time and so it depends on the age of the deposits that you live in like this is a prime area because this is what we call our ashy country okay what we call our ashy country is that very fine silk deposits the whole of our country isn't like that it's only just patches what we're looking at is the bottom of ancient water hole so a bit the same as today as a sheep or a cow dying they die it gets bogged in the bottom of dams those bones get covered over with mud and they could be preserved for someone else to find later on but a bone of a dead sheep say out in the paddock out in the dry out here it'll just break down the sun it'll be gone within 10 years so mud and silks is the best kind of yeah water yep that's right and that seems to be the secret and so it was 100 million years ago when dinosaurs were walking around out here when an animal dies it usually disappears to become a fossil it has to die in the right place a place where the bones will be protected and preserved the Winton fossil Bones have been preserved in the bottoms of billabong's swamps and River channels that cover the area 95 million years ago over time sediments built up on top of the bones bearing them under hundreds of meters of soil but if we're going to stumble across fossils Natural Forces need to bring them back toward the surface foreign I'm no farmer but you're here to put your fence post in crooked I didn't actually put him in someone somehow I followed a bit about 100 years ago and I think he probably put him in straight and he also put him in a fair bit further than the ground where they are now I do so what's happened well what's happened is that these uh these posts have worked their way out of the ground and so we've got a whole fence line with that used to have your bottom wire about that far off the ground and now it's that far off the ground the topsoil in the area where David Farms known as black soil has a characteristic described as self-mulching as the soil dries it cracks open deep into the ground when rain falls the loose layer of surface soil and pieces of plant matter are washed to the bottom of the cracks as this process is repeated it has a rotational effect on the soil profile lifting it slightly every time over thousands of years as the surface of the Earth erodes away the cracks extend deeper into the ground once they've extended below a dinosaur bone or other object that object becomes part of the rotating soil profile and so it's slowly brought to the surface but fossils can't tell the experts everything often a fossil can tell us what but not why so we need to make an educated guess matabarasaurus here could walk on her hind legs or on all fours herbivorous and seven meters long but here's the special thing with this creature mutt had a big bulbous Hollow chambered snout but what for the best guess is it Amplified the animal's Raw but we don't actually know that it roared perhaps it had the world's loudest squeak but we do know a lot considering how much the world has changed If dinosaurs came back to the Earth today they wouldn't recognize this place not just because of the Cities we've built or the forests we've felt or all the other ways with which we've shaped our landscape but because the land masses of the world today really are in a different shape by looking at rocks identical in one place to those in a far away country scientists can tell that land now apart was once joined our understanding of the supercontinent Pangea comes from such evidence we also know that gondwana broke away from Pangea and that Australia broke away from gondwana scientists can also prove that the continents that broke away from that original land mass are still on the move but don't worry we're drifting terribly slowly in fact if you stayed in the one place from the moment of your birth you'll have moved about seven meters by the time of your 100th birthday that's about the same speed as the growth of your toenail but when we're looking at the geological record we're calculating periods of time over hundreds and millions of years and then distances become immense four and a half thousand kilometers of continental drift since the age of the dinosaurs [Music] and one of the astonishing things that has been discovered since Elliot is how many different types of dinosaurs once inhabited the Winton District [Music] Elliot the sauropod was one of the most significant discoveries of dinosaur life in this part of the world but he wasn't the first as far back as 1865 fossils from marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs had been found near hewandan by the early 20th century numerous other fines of marine animals had been made around Richmond and oddsanins have been turning up ever since this place Lark Quarry houses something quite different and quite unique not a skeleton not even a bone body parts are the types of fossils that grab the headlines but these aren't the most plentiful type of evidence trace fossils provide evidence of life in a different way and here it's in the form of footprints more than 3 000 of them the panicked Footprints of a dinosaur's speed here is evidence that dinosaurs gathered in herds massive herds here are the traces of around 150 two-legged dinosaurs running for their lives some of the stampeding mold were emu sized or mythopod and some chicken-sized theropods like the solarisol you multiply the length of a footprint by around five you get the approximate height at the hip and that's how we know that the solarisol was built like a chalk he was running from a bigger theropod whose hip was at least one and a half meters off the ground now one theory is that he was running from Australia venator winternensis whose name means Southern hunter from Winton all right a few days after the Stampede it rained before the mud had dried enough to crack the lake Rose and covered the footprints with Sandy sediment floods lay down further sediment and as millions of years past the sediment layers were compressed to form Rock [Music] we are able to imagine the time of the winter dinosaurs around 95 million years ago because of the bones the trackways and the fossil evidence that has been found in this part of Queensland [Music] foreign [Music] these Clues paint a picture of a world so far from our own however the discovery of each new Winton dinosaur was made possible by that chance find of a sauropod femur the discovery of Elliot the success in locating his remains and the knowledge that Australia does have a rich dinosaur Heritage has revolutionized Australian dinosaur paleontology this knowledge and the great public enthusiasm following the new discoveries has led to the development of the Australian age of dinosaurs Museum of Natural History and in the past decade it has amassed the largest collection of Australian dinosaur fossils in the world foreign when we first started we were just going to build a little tiny Museum in town but we soon became aware that what we had out here was the vast majority of Australia's dinosaurs but the other reason is that we knew that unless we actually got in and did something about it it was never going to happen and these things were never going to come out of the ground in our lifetime we're even our kids lifetime but more than that you got your kids you know you want your education side of it this is a research side of it all of those things not just great for Australia not just great for paleontology but keeping these little Regional centers alive so it was just the greatest thing that we could do for our community we thought was to start the Australian dinosaurs Museum the community responded embracing the museum and the prehistoric creatures it had given to the world the Winton dinosaurs have now become an integral part of the town's identity the Winton Community have been incredibly supportive haven't they that's right it's it's really exciting up there because you can see locals that are either local kids or land holders coming in and being involved physically with the excavation the discovery the preparation The Collection maintenance of all these fossils so it's not something that's just the responsibility of us vertebrate paleontologists now it's a completely open science policy where anyone who has an interest in it can be trained up and brought in off the street and then you're contributing physically to Australia's natural history and that's something unique and it sounds to me it's almost like that the science wouldn't be progressing forward as quickly unless you had that volunteer base that we're getting from the local communities absolutely I mean I'm one vertebrate paleontologist and we're finding hundreds and hundreds of dinosaur bones the fossils take months and months of preparation if it was simply only a few paleontologists prepping these fossils it would be literally decades before even one skeleton would have been prepared one of the locals bitten by the dinosaur bug is Trish Sloan Trish has an integral role managing the Museum's preparation Laboratory [Music] I'm going to guess there's a little more to paleontology than just Digging Up Bones just a little bit once we dig the bones up in the flat country out there and the paddocks we then bring it into here and work on it and how fragile are they how careful do we have to be when we're working with them uh look you've got to be really careful you've got to treat them with respect and care so each dinosaur is different so it depends what kind of preservation how they came out of the ground Wade for instance is one of the animals that we're working on right now and he is encased in really hard rock so we can go a little bit more heavy-handed on it with some heavier tools but if you prep too fast you're going to put the bone in danger so you've got to do it carefully and slowly so I've noticed some casts around the around the bones do you do that out in the field yeah that Plastering is done in the field and that's a preservation method we find the boundaries of the bone and then create a pedestal and then once we create that pedestal we then do three layers of materials so we put elf oil around first then we put wet newspaper on it and that works in two ways it keeps the soil moist around the bone and it also slows down the drying of the plaster so it doesn't break the bone inside and then we apply Hessian and plastic casting keeps stored safely for however long as it's in a storage area [Music] a lot of Bones here at the moment how do you keep track of everything well there's a lot of paperwork each bone that you see in our lab has got a conservation record and that conservation record will have everything listed on it from the number we give it in the field it might get a fossil number which is for the whole dinosaur it'll get a locality number GPS readings scientists notes the more detail we have on that piece of paper the better and then when the scientists walk in we can just go here you go and what's your favorite part of this job you know I've there's a lot of different elements that I love of it the discovery of dinosaurs the fact that I'm part of something so unique I found my passion in life you have a new baby my new baby I've got lots of new babies they're really big though what we're going to do is we're going to use this tool this is an air chisel and it is the fastest and most productive tool that we have in our lab all right so what we'll do I've got a lot of rock here on the side of the bone so I'm actually going to use this flat Edge to take off some of this rock foreign [Music] so that could be a bit of bone coming out in the side so we'll go to this little one this is a escribe this is the the more commonly used tool in our lab and we use this to to do a little bit of detail investigating whether this is associated with the bone or maybe it's just a floater and so our float is just say a Chipotle fragment yeah [Music] we find bones in rocks because of water water seeping through the bones sets off chemical reactions causing the bones to become as hard as Stone the sediment in which the bones are buried is also turned to rock by the chemical reaction with time more and more layers of rock encase the bone sealing and protecting it imagine dimontosaurus here [Music] 18 meters long and over 20 tonne nothing remotely like him walks Australia today [Music] imagine this a creature dies under just the right circumstances and a hundred million years later you are the one who scrapes back the soil and sees it for the first time how would you feel well it's this excitement that brings people from all over the world whenever the digs are on [Music] thank you [Music] thank you in the greatest scheme of things human beings have existed for only a brief moment in time we've Ruled The Roost for less than a hundred thousand years the Giants Well they swaggered around Lords of all they surveyed for more than a hundred million years great big things as we've seen and others here small armored and with a horny beak for picking off fruits and seeds [Music] uncovering the dinosaur story is what the digs are all about the digs out here in Winton are organized winton's Style by Judy Elliott [Music] so you find a bone out here then how on Earth do you go about organizing a dig we don't do a lot of advertising but we've been doing it now for years the Queensland Museum started us off so we got a few diggers from there and pretty soon some of those diggers became Duggars having sorry you go from a digger to a Duggar here once you've had your first dinosaur dig you're it you're a dagger so they're not all scientists they're not all paleontologists not not in the least we've had policemen we've had Cooks we just get them from all scales how do like logistically how do you get it together because how many people do you have out here for the actual we usually have 13 to 14 diggers and then we have what's David and myself sometimes one of our two sons are there and then two or three staff from the age of dinosaurs and we'll often have a Queensland Museum representative or a couple and we have our own paleos who don't actually work for us they volunteer [Music] well breakfast eight o'clock and everyone's out the door and then we get to the dig site and we go straight into the pit and they pick their spots you just dig away these bones that you've got out here they're they're Priceless so who does the training they're Rock unless you really hit them with a sledgehammer you can't do a lot of damage and let's face it we all can do a little bit of damage but if you don't get in there and and have a go with the team you're not going to see them you're not going to find them and so they'll still be in the ground but as soon as people see that there is bone there everything slows right down and then you're using the little tools so you don't have to be an expert to do it you just need to be considerate I suppose of what you're finding of what you're working with David Elliott's Discovery and all the work that he and his supporters have done since have put Winton on the dinosaur map but this little town has another claim to fame on a property not far from here a poet named Andrew Barton Patterson or banjo Patterson penned the most famous lyric in Australia it was here he wrote Waltzing Matilda one of Australia's most widely known Bush ballads Waltzing Matilda tells the story of a Swagman camped by a Waterhole but there's more than one famous banjo in Matilda in Winton on most Deeds they discover a bone or perhaps a partial skeleton but on one dig they discovered the remains of two different dinosaurs buried together in what was once an ancient Billabong these are the remains of the two creatures the Australian age of dinosaurs museum has fondly named banjo and Matilda more about them did you find them no I didn't actually find banjo Matilda they were found by a lady who lives other side of Winton probably 150 kilometers away from us and she rang Judy and I up and said there's this great big bone of the ground come and have a look there was a huge sauropod dinosaur but not only that there was a danger in the pit with her and within our first dig we found a couple little bones you know we realized that there was something pretty exciting there because it was definitely not Matilda and when we kept going of course it was a beautiful therapy dinosaur in there so it's a carnivorous dinosaur right beside Matilda so two dinosaurs for the price of one banjo is the first carnivorous dinosaur known by more than one bone or one scrap of bone in Australia that's all that have been found before suddenly we had teeth we had claws got Jaws so this is symbolize the whole hands the most complete specimen of a carnivore that's been found today in Australia definitely and Matilda was exactly the same she was the most complete specimen of a sewer pot that we'd found today you can have all sorts of interpretations can't you just gotta look at the science and think well what is what's possible what's not and really there's only several things that can be possible foreign banjo chants on the diamond tinosaurus known as Matilda she was stuck in the mud and sensing an easy kill banjo passed [Music] so do we know for sure that Matilda killed banjo well of course we don't but then that's the Intrigue of paleontology investigating the deaths of Matilda and banjo around 98 million years ago is similar to a homicide detective today pouring over the evidence and tracking down a murderer so how do we weigh out this evidence we've got more surprising I think pretty well most of the dinosaurs that we find are sauropods I often used to wonder why aren't we getting all sorts of dinosaurs in our deposit and then it really started to occur to me as what exactly those deposits are and those deposits are ancient silt deposits they're the bottom of muddy water holes basically just like this one we're seeing large animals that are coming down to here that get a drink and they're not coming back out again and you'd have to wonder why that is and then to do that you've really got to look at the solar pods and you're looking at the largest animals that ever walked the Earth they're 30 ton animals they've got no real enemies a mob of silver pods are virtually indestructible nothing could have touched them but by the same token they got old nothing loose forever and animals as they get old they get frail and I find that with my sheep and my cattle when they do and they start walking into a water hole similar as this often they don't come out again and what happens is they go in for a drink and they can't pull their legs out of the mud and sometimes if you don't get back to a dam for say three or four days and the Sheep has died on the edge of the water a lot of things that come along clean them up and you'll find a few leg bones can you imagine a huge big you know 20 or 30 meter long sauropod dead here and scavengers coming down and pulling away at it they'd pull the neck away they'd pull the tail you just get a few scraps and a few limb bones that are all down in the mud so that's why we only find the leg bones at the dining well it's it's probably the reason we find more leg bones than anything else doesn't look that deep does it no you just watch this how much money is there that's just settled out of this water aha so 30 tons he hasn't got to sit up on top like we are he's just gonna go straight in [Music] [Music] this fellow when Tony Titan Titanic 16 meters 15 Tons the name means Winton Giant in honor of the place it lived around David Elliott continuing the family business of grazing sheep in this part of the world one day we stumbled Upon a Monster of a bone his understanding of the country around him and it changed our understanding too it helped us picture an ancient landscape that was once here and see the terrible Footprints of the monsters that once lived in the outback [Music] foreign we've just started to understand the scale and richness of Australia's buried dinosaur past to tell the story of banjo and Matilda understand the footprints of La Quarry learn more from every dig every fossil every fragment all because David Elliott mustering sheep recognized something that wasn't a rock without knowing this we wouldn't have any clue about the huge dinosaurs that have been found right now so now we're right at the start of this great period of Discovery in Natural History I call it a natural history Revolution because elsewhere and on Earth in different countries they've had 150 years of finding big dinosaurs now it's Australia's turn and we've just started foreign [Music] tells us about our remote past but it also explains how our world has changed how our climate has changed and how the slow unending course of nature continues to change our planet it's difficult to think of anything more important than understanding how our world works because if we are truly to understand where it's going first we need to understand where it's been the Australian outback is a harsh and unforgiving place but I think I'd prefer it like this than sharing it with monsters [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 131,929

Keywords: Timeline, History Documentaries, Full Length Documentaries, Dinosaurs, Archaeology, Dinosaurs in Australia, Australian fossils, dinosaur fossils, dinosaur discoveries, prehistoric animals, dinosaurs documentary

Id: MyR2Uy00iuw

Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023